Rinehart now a true miner as Roy Hill stockpiles iron ore

The dynasty-making Roy Hill mine, majority owned by Hancock Prospecting, might only be half built, but project chief Barry Fitzgerald said it was now operational – arguably making Australia’s richest person a genuine miner.

Mr Fitzgerald said as part of “diversionary" works on site, the operation had been stockpiling ore.

“As part of that, we have in fact mined and put on the stockpiles 465,000 tonnes of iron ore," he told a Perth forum on Thursday. “When we talk about the project we need to think we’ve almost got half a million tonnes of iron ore on the stockpile. We have already commenced in many ways the mining operations."

Exports are due to start in September 2015.

Hancock Prospecting owns 70 per cent of the project, located near the Pilbara town of Newman, with the remaining 30 per cent owned by South Korean steel company Posco, Taiwan’s China Steel Corporation and Japanese steelmaker Marubeni Corporation.

The owners recently secured funding for the project, which included $US7.2 billion ($7.9 billion) from major export credit agencies.

Mr Fitzgerald said the project no longer requires foreign labour, with an abundance of job seekers in the industry. The project owners were criticised in 2012 after winning an enterprise migration agreement, allowed it to hire more than 1700 overseas workers on 457 visas.Miners, including BHP Billiton, have made big cuts in their work forces due to the declining prices being paid for the key steel making ingredient,for iron ore.

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Mr Fitzgerald said “other producers will have problems" before Roy Hill.

“We have spent four years focusing on margin . . . focusing on being productive," Mr Fitzgerald said.

“My definition of a failure from my point of view would be if Roy Hill had to do a reorganisation and shed labour. Our success in our view is to do what we said we’d do and not have to do a cost reduction program in three or four years."